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Contributor: Stefani Allegretti. Lesson ID: 13344
You are what you eat. Food is fuel! Have you ever heard someone use these expressions? They both have to do with nutrition! In this lesson, you'll learn about nutrition basics.
Your body needs good food like a car needs good fuel.
No! It's the same with the human body.
When the body doesn't have good food and essential nutrients from food, it doesn't run properly and can break down.
Nutrition is simply the study of food.
All food contains nutrients, and those nutrients help us stay healthy. Nutrients are the healthy parts within food - like vitamins and proteins - that all living things need to live and grow.
Watch this video on healthy eating.
Healthy foods like vegetables, fruits, grains, and more provide the human body with nutrients because they contain important vitamins and minerals the body uses to work properly.
For example, oranges contain vitamin C.
That's because vitamin C helps the body heal and get stronger.
Different vitamins help the body do different things well. When you eat foods that have many different vitamins, it helps your entire body function properly.
Fruits and vegetables are amazing foods because they contain lots of different nutrients that we need! Learn more in the video below.
There sure are a lot of fruits and vegetables!
Take a moment and try!
Now, let's learn more about vitamins and what they do.
The table below shows some common vitamins that the body needs as well as some of the foods in which they are found. You can also see one of the ways these vitamins help the human body.
| Vitamin | Foods With Vitamin | Ways Vitamin Helps Us | |
| vitamin A | carrots, sweet potatoes | helps your eyes | |
| vitamin B12 | clams, fish | helps blood cells stay healthy | |
| vitamin C | oranges, lemons | helps the immune system and body to heal | |
| vitamin D | milk | helps the teeth and bones stay strong | |
| vitamin E | sunflower seeds, almonds | helps the immune system |
Another important part of good nutrition is having a balanced diet. This means you aren't having too much or too little of the different types of healthy foods your body needs to work correctly.
For example, let's say you really love strawberries, and they were all you wanted to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you only ate strawberries and nothing else, your body would be missing very important nutrients and vitamins from other foods and would not work properly.
A balanced diet includes grains, vegetables, fruits, proteins, and dairy or calcium. You can see the different foods that belong to each group in the image below:
Eating a variety of nutritious foods like the ones you see in the picture can help your body to stay healthy and strong. Explore them in this next video.
Let's move on to the Got It? section and test your knowledge!
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